Owning a business is like sailing a ship at sea in unpredictable weather. Entrepreneurship is dynamic, just like the marketplace, and often functions with a high tolerance for chaos. An organization must remain fluid and be responsive to the quickly changing current. Many large businesses find instability intolerable, but market instability and the resultant chaos are the reality of the modern business environment. Like a ship at sea, larger businesses can handle the chaos without the movement and sensitivity of the smaller business. This sensitivity to market vibrations, however, can increase the competitive edge, if harnessed successfully. The key is the frequency of the vibration – organizations must learn to key in to harmonious vibration with the markets. Think of this as controlled chaos; by harnessing the energy that chaos naturally exudes, you can actually benefit.
If survival of the entrepreneurial firm depends on providing products or services to the market, remaining responsive to the economic buying behavior, the organization can control its destiny by placing value on a business staffed with proud, motivated intrepreneurs, the internal entrepreneurs within the business organization who have the motivation and expertise to bring the lion’s share of forward momentum to the company. In the future, as global volatility increases and the market garners more and more hungry new competitors, the need to evolve in harmony with the market demands grows exponentially. It will become critical to identify necessary changes or modifications in products or services. You cannot expect consumers to consume in a linear fashion.
Learn to improvise
As with a jam band, a small, controlled amount of structure in the business, coupled with intense communication leads to good improvisation. This allows for exploration of much more complicated and adaptive behaviors. Too much structure creates rigidity that stifles lateral thinking, but too little structure is weak and creates chaos and a lack of focus. Improvisational businesses can shift tactics quickly and play on cost or innovation advantages, and they excel at finding unexploited market niches. The key is to create a strategy that you can easily shift when the winds change.
According to Brown and Eisenhardt (1998), improvisational businesses have three traits in common:
1.Adaptive culture: managers expect change, and anticipate the need to iterate, backtrack, and adjust. Change becomes the expectation, rather than the exception.
2.Semi-structures: managers have few structures, but do rely on a select group of points that they remain faithful to. These are things like prioritizing, meeting deadlines, maintaining accountability, and having targeted, and real-time measures to assess progress.
3.Real-time communication: improvisational businesses have a startling amount of communication, but this is not communication without boundaries. Communication is focused on the present and task-oriented.
Strategies that change the rules of the game are alluring but can be difficult to find. The improvisational approach can provide some of these home-run strategies by quickly spotting the temporary advantage that comes from the blending of strategy and luck, and can act rapidly to take advantage of the competitive opening created. Only the best companies with the best execution can change the game and still win.
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